Anarchy in the UK

Simon McBurney began acting in Shakespeare at nine but later switched to comedy at Cambridge. After graduating, he left Thatcher's Britain to study mime with Jacques Lecoq in Paris, co-founding the theatre company Complicite, now Britain's leading exponent of visual drama. This month's revival at the National of a keynote work confirms his success

'Very often it is a lot of chaos in which everything is laid out, where everything is possible' ... Simon McBurney. Photo: Eamonn McCabe

When he was a student in Paris in the early 1980s, Simon McBurney and his brother Gerard went to a production of Verdi's rarely performed opera I masnadieri at the Chatelet theatre. It turned out to be an excruciating stand-and-deliver 19th-century performance with amateurishly painted scenery. But even more offensive than the staging, in the eyes of the McBurney brothers, was the ecstatic reception it received.

"Simon ducked down and came back up from his bag wearing his red nose," remembers Gerard, a composer, "and he started doing the same as the others, yelling out 'Bravo, Bravo!' but louder than everybody else. None of the stiff-looking opera-goers quite knew how to react and nervously nodded back to him. On the way out, still with the red nose on, he walked up to all the dowagers in the foyer, shaking the hands of these women wearing jewels and fur coats, very warmly and saying 'C'est magnifique! C'est magnifique, n'est pas?'"

McBurney has always occupied an ambiguous position in British theatre, somewhere between the iconoclast and the clown. With his company Complicite, he has irrevocably changed the face of British theatre. Shows such as The Visit (1989), which updated Dürrenmatt's classic melodrama with explosive physicality, The Street of Crocodiles (1992), inspired by the writings of Bruno Schulz, and The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994), based on the writings of John Berger, have dislodged words as the focus of British theatre. "They have created a beautiful interaction between music, visual theatre, physical theatre and words," says director Pierre Audi. "Their contribution is to open up the horizons of audiences who don't need to be constantly obsessed with the idea of coming to listen to words, words, words. They have shown us that stagecraft is a form of authorship."

The company, established in the early 80s with director Annabel Arden and actors Marcello Magni and Fiona Gordon, was founded as a largely comic mime troupe. A Minute Too Late, created in 1984 and revived this month at the National Theatre in London, managed to transform the morbid topic of death by satirising our clumsiness in dealing with mortality into an uproarious slapstick event. And More Bigger Snacks Now (1985) won the Perrier comedy award at Edinburgh and was seen on the Wogan TV chat show. Some of this comic ability comes down to McBurney's prowess as a comic actor, which has landed him roles in Hollywood films, such as The Reckoning (2004) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004). "He has an extraordinary sense of timing," says Berger. "It's as if you combine the timing of a stand-up comic and the musical sense of Rostropovich. You can see it when he is telling a story, both on the stage and in life."

Some have criticised the company for indulging physical theatre tics and favouring flashy visual style over content. "It is debatable whether it has anything new to say about the stories," wrote the Guardian's Michael Billington of The Street of Crocodiles in 1992. "Rather, they provide the company with another exercise in pure style. If I were to attempt a criticism of Complicite, I would say 'less form, more matter'."

But for acolytes McBurney represents a fusion of storytelling and visual elements that rivals anything dreamed up by the English language's greatest dramatists: "It is a combination of playfulness, of imaginative appeal to the audiences and of seriousness of subject matter and purpose," says Tom Morris, an associate director at the National and a champion of Complicite's work, "with a technical visual language that makes the company so extraordinary. The body of a performer becomes the imaginative trigger which releases a picture or a memory in the mind of the audience." It is "using the bodies of the performers in a way that Shakespeare used text".

In person, McBurney cuts an equally ambiguous figure. First there is his appearance - a curiously malleable face, sometimes unsettlingly suggesting that of a gargoyle: "I remember the first time I met him, it struck me that he was an incredibly ugly man," says actress Kathyrn Hunter, "and then as soon as I got to know him he became incredibly beautiful. That only happens with a very few extraordinary people."

Then there is his rather eccentric manner, constantly wrapping himself around furniture, and cracking his knuckles with unnerving violence. Even the most trivial inquiry is met with an immensely pained expression and silences that often run to 20 or 30 seconds: "It is a strange feature of Simon that he can just fall into those immense silences," continues Hunter. "He's often on an interior emotional rollercoaster in those silences. Those of us who love him, just wait..."

Unlike many other practitioners of verbal or physical theatre, McBurney shuns grandiose theories: "When he is working on a show he never brings a theoretical apparatus along with him," says Gerard. "He believes the imaginative process is restricted if you bring theory to bear on it before it happens. He also has no conception of his own style. Style is for him a modern invention that brings bad overtones of surface appearance and the commercial side of popular culture." Hunter says:"Simon is a real theatre animal. I wouldn't say he is intellectual. He smells his way into a piece, that is my experience of him, he will kind of stalk the rehearsal room and sniff his way into the text."

McBurney lives in a large top-floor flat in a fashionable corner of north London. His partner of four years is Australian actress Jacqueline McKenzie, who starred in the films Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), though there is little sign that they live together. He claims to be a nomadic creature with relatively few "points of stability", one of which is the rehearsal room.

Asked whether there is a discernible approach that characterises Complicite's shows, he responds with one of his 30-second pauses before answering: "I find it sometimes very difficult to separate things out," he says eventually. "I don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all, I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with, so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity." A Complicite show emerges from the barely contained, barely directed chaos of the rehearsal room: "When I read things about what we do, or receive criticism, often I don't recognise the things people are talking about. So, for example when people talk about technique, there isn't really any technique; very often it is a lot of chaos in which everything is laid out, where everything is possible."

The Complicite ethos, if there is one, seems to boil down to a painstaking, almost obsessive desire to find visual representation for every moment and atom of the text or story: "What we would have done is identified that tiny moment and improvised around it and tried to find different ways of expressing that stage in the story. I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space."

McBurney was born in Cambridge in 1957, the youngest child of Charles Brian Montagu McBurney, an American academic and archaeologist, and Anne Charles, a secretary of Anglo-Scottish-Irish extraction, distant cousins who met and married during the second world war. When Simon's father obtained a post teaching at the university, where his students included the young Prince Charles, the family moved into a huge, rambling house on the outskirts of the town. "It was a draughty, dark Victorian semi-detached house which was full of strange ghosts and had no central heating," says McBurney, "the kind of place nobody wanted in the 50s at all. Everyone else lived in modern houses."

There was also very little in the way of modern amenities: "It was an age when lots of families were getting televisions and we didn't have one," says his brother. "We had a radio, which was stored at the top of the house and it was brought out once a year when my father helplessly tried to get it to work in order to listen to the festival of nine lessons and carols from King's but then it was put away again on Boxing Day."

His mother, who had aspired to be an actress, and had studied at the Comédie Française in Paris, encouraged her children to perform, arranging regular trips to the pantomime and theatre, even directing plays in the back garden. "Every year she would adapt whatever was around," McBurney recalls. "When we went to see Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music, she would adapt the songs for the Christmas pantomime, which she would write and rehearse and nearly have a nervous breakdown over."

At school, McBurney proved an academic disappointment: "I was terrible. My brother calls me constitutionally disobedient. I don't really recall doing a stroke of work. I just wasn't inspired by any of my teachers." He did, however, show a prodigious talent for acting and appeared in various school productions, playing a murderer in Macbeth when he was nine, Octavius Caesar in Julius Caesar at 10 and Caliban in The Tempest at a very precocious 12. "I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor," he says. "I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.' My parents tried to see if there was anyone who could advise me and sent me to see Toby Robertson. He said there is only one question you should ask somebody who wants to become an actor: 'Can you starve?'"

Going up to Cambridge in 1977, he studied English literature, but was soon skipping lectures to rehearse shows at the Footlights theatre club. "I remember doing a punk-rock Julius Caesar, playing Mark Antony with a band called the Wooden Tops and everything was screamed into the microphone." Developing a largely wordless style, he gained a growing reputation as a comic actor in many of the reviews presented at the theatre with his friends, including Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, his then girlfriend Emma Thompson and her best friend Arden. An engagement to appear at the first night of the London Comedy Store in 1978 was followed by an invitation, from then producer Griff Rhys Jones, to take up a regular slot on BBC Radio 4. "At that point, it was looking extremely likely that I was all set for a career in comedy," he recalls.

But then came an event that shook McBurney profoundly. "My father died in my final year and I think that suddenly changed everything," he says. "It coincided with the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, as well as a number of other things, and I decided I wanted to get out of this country."

In 1981, he applied to study at the Jacques Lecoq mime school in Paris, then relatively little known, and was awarded a place. "I now regard Jacques Lecoq as the first real teacher I ever had," he says. "I wanted to make theatre that I can see, and Jacques gave me the materials to do that. The point of Jacques was that there was no style but he helped you better articulate some of the things you wanted."

This period also brought together the founding members of Complicite: Gordon was living in the same building as McBurney, Arden was constantly passing through Paris, and Italian actor Magni was on the Lecoq course. "We were studying together but in two different classes," says Magni, "and then I had the opportunity of working together with him on one of these presentations. At the end, I remember shaking hands with him and saying: 'One day we might work together.' And I've now been living 22 years in England, all because of that handshake."

The name of the company, Theatre de Complicite, came about with equal spontaneity: "Complicite in French doesn't have quite the pejorative meaning it does in English though I like the idea that it's a partnership in an illegal action, that there is something wicked about it. It's meant in the sense that when the audience watch the actors the sense of relationship between the actors on stage might be so intimate that with a bit of luck the audience might whisper to one another in the middle of the show: 'I bet they're fucking each other'."

For their first show, they simply got together in a room to test if pure creativity, without props or décor, could be the sole catalyst for an explosive theatrical reaction: "I had a teacher who said that if you just sit on stage and do nothing, something will happen," says McBurney. "So, Fiona and I sat on deck chairs and we didn't do anything for about an hour-and-a-half and yet we made people laugh." Entitled Put it On Your Head and premiered in 1983, the show was an outrageously slapstick, largely non-verbal exploration of seaside etiquette and was played to small venues around Europe.

In late 1983, McBurney returned to England to begin work on the second production, A Minute Too Late, which arose from the death of his father. "It was entirely about death, but it is the funniest show we've ever done," he says. "My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say. It was based just on the sense of those reactions." Then came More Bigger Snacks Now, a satire of the greed and junk culture of Thatcherism. "It was inspired by a Steve Bell cartoon," says McBurney, "in which Thatcher was giving a speech on television and on top of the set was an egg that keeps growing and eventually starts to crack. At the climax of Thatcher's speech, the egg splits open and out of it pops a penguin which immediately screams 'More Bigger Snacks Now' as a response to Thatcherism and its ideals." Beginning in a squalid living-room swamped with consumer detritus, such as rolls of Sellotape and bottles of pills, it travels in the course of an hour through Italian restaurants, hotel lobbies and airports. A flurry of shorter pieces followed: Please, Please, Please (1986) and Anything for a Quiet Life (1987), a piece about the Kafkaesque life of the office.

But even after five years, Complicite was less a theatre company than a fractious collective of fellow travellers. "We were always on the verge of breaking up and constantly arguing," says McBurney. "The whole thing was a total mess, it was truly anarchic."

Then, in 1989, Pierre Audi threw open the doors of the Almeida theatre for an unprecedented 15-week season, which would completely transform the company and its work. "It was an extraordinary gesture at the time," says Audi. "Complicite wasn't as well known as it is today. But the Almeida was the first space that offered the company a platform to be totally creative and free."

Characteristically, the organisation of the event had a distinct element of Complicite anarchy: "The poor production management walked out about five times, because it was such chaos," says McBurney. "For a while, everyone wanted to do their own show and we went off into various corners. And we realised that these shows were really going to be awful, and that we had to get together to find a piece and to take some of our ideas and apply them to text. And that was how The Visit came about."

With overtones of the revenge melodrama, previous productions of the play had treated it naturalistically, the story of a millionairess who returns to her native village to exact the ultimate punishment on the man who stole her innocence at 17 and betrayed her. But, right from the beginning of the rehearsal process, the company began to extract insights and surprises from the text. "We felt that rereading it in the German there was much more to it," says McBurney. By opening night, the millionairess had been transformed into a sinister, bejewelled reptile on gilded crutches corrupting her home town with a deathly grin (and earning Kathryn Hunter an Olivier award) while the villagers swirl around, quite literally, in the slipstream of passing trains. According to Claire Armitstead in the Guardian, the production "marked an important staging post in the life of an increasingly important company. Apart from the obvious implications in terms of an avant garde company now ready to engage with mainstream literature, Arden's feisty production is one in the eye for anyone who was inclined to dismiss Complicite's work as physical buffoonery."

The Visit was revived at the National in 1991, reaffirming Complicite's growing reputation as the country's most important physical theatre company. After a production of The Winter's Tale in 1992, acted by just eight people "doubling and trebling all the way", the company went on to their next major production: The Street of Crocodiles. The idea for the piece came when McBurney was sent a copy of Bruno Schulz's short stories of life in a small provincial Polish town in the shadow of the approaching Nazis. They were held to be "unstageable", and McBurney treated this as a challenge. Using just the bodies of the actors and a few basic props, the company succeeded in spectacularly evoking the world of Schulz, upturned chairs becoming the tentative shoots of spring, an aviary brought to life by flapping books. "The show reveals also how well the company creates theatre in umpteen different ways," commented Alaistair Macaulay in the Financial Times, "by using movement, speech, music, lighting, props, scenery. But what is best is how all this virtuosity and variety are directed simply into telling the story."

The next landmark Complicite show came as a consequence of The Street of Crocodiles: "One night while we were doing the show someone said that John Berger was in the audience and he came back to the bar afterwards and was very excited by the show," McBurney recalls, "and a few nights later I invited him to supper and we talked and talked and talked endlessly, and I suddenly realised that there was one of his stories that I would like to do something with."

The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol portrayed the stunted, diminutive Lucie as a kind of embodiment of the enduring European peasant spirit against the onslaught of the 20th century, covering three incarnations: her first life, during which she is subject to two world wars and banishment by her own brothers, a second life as she barely exists on the fringes of the village, and a third as she returns as a ghost. "In this piece, Complicite have achieved the perfect marriage between style and content," wrote Charles Spencer in the Telegraph. "Their movement and mime-based skills are as remarkable as ever, with the seven-strong cast playing children, cows, chickens, pigs and even plants with enchanting wit and ingenuity."

With Out of a House Walked a Man in 1994, McBurney moved on to the curious, fragmented subject of Russian absurdist short-story writer Daniil Kharms. Then after the Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht at the National in 1997, he decided to revisit a theme that had interested him from a series of workshops he had given before The Street of Crocodiles: "I was trying to investigate the idea of memory so when I was touring Lucie Cabrol through Japan and Australia, everywhere we went we did workshops investigating the subject of memory. Then everything started to grow because I had read this book about a body found in ice." The image of the 5,200-year-old frozen body in the Tyrolean Alps became a central theme of the show, an illustration of what social and psychological traces human beings leave behind and the conjectures of scientists. "This is one of the most wonderful pieces of theatre - theatre as exploration and questioning - that I have seen," wrote John Peter in the Sunday Times, "and it speaks with grim eloquence to a century whose progress is marked out by mass graves full of anonymous bodies."

In 2000, McBurney began work on Light, adapted from Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren's wittily bleak novel dealing with bubonic plague, multiplying rabbits and the basic fundamentals of human knowledge and morality. Then in 2003, with The Elephant Vanishes, he took the company in another new direction, not only physically to Japan to work with the Setagaya Public Theatre of Tokyo, but also into the relatively uncharted technological waters of multimedia. But even this extensive use of screens, video projections and light walls was deeply embedded in the source text, stories by Haruki Murakami. "Murakami puts his finger on something which we all feel," says McBurney. "Sometimes people talk about an urban anomie or a dislocation, but I think it's much more specific than that. I think that in this ultra-consumerist society we live in, we are experiencing a disquiet particular to the way we are living." Even with all this high-tech wizardry at McBurney's disposal, it was the clarity of the storytelling and the disarming simplicity of the devices, such as the use of an on-screen eye and a few chairs to represent the elephant, that remained most memorable. "The result is an astonishing piece of theatre in which communal storytelling effortlessly blends with high-tech wizardry," wrote Billington.

Measure for Measure at the National last summer retained the use of multimedia, but was very much an exercise in Complicite basics. Now, the revival of A Minute Too Late couldn't be a more potent reminder of the physical theatre origins of the group. But it would be premature to say that the Complicite story is in danger of turning full circle. "I see no pattern, no reason whatsoever in anything I do," McBurney insists. The very best he can hope for in the future is for the creative chaos to continue to rule. "I constantly feel," he says, "when I am not waking in the middle of the night with darkness, then I'm still very much trying to do what I can. I'm curious, just like I was when I was a child, that there is everything still to do. Rather than having less and less things to do and ticking them off on a list, the more I do the more I discover there is to do. So, I just dream of all those things that are to be done. I feel like I really haven't begun."